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It’s challenging to modernize warehouse operations without a comprehensive plan. After all, the path to failure is laid with good intentions, and failing to plan is planning to fail. For the distribution industry—a sector awash with activity and evolution, many companies are forging new paths with the help of technology.
In our last blog exploring the role of an ERP partner in helping you through your ERP selection and implementation journey, we highlighted the importance of communication and needs documentation, noting that this is a critical step not only for getting the right functionality, but in driving excitement for a project.
Every distributor is different. Different products, different suppliers, and different locations—all scientifically chosen to maintain margins, improve delivery speed, and ultimately ensure that the supply chain remains in a state of flow. But there’s another area in which they are different as well—technological maturity, risk tolerance and goals. In turn, this leads to distributors living in different realities, existing in different stages of their warehouse modernization journey.
Over the past decade, wholesale distribution firms have been exposed to new processes and technologies. While not everyone has made the leap into a modernization initiative, many have.
It's not just a landscape of move product and collect money. Success requires flow, and flow requires a connected experience for the entire business. But for growing distribution firms, there comes a point where things start to slow down. Often, growth can turn a once-efficient process into a multi-step nightmare that exposes you to risk. Risk of inaccuracy—in purchasing, fulfilling orders, collecting cash and more.
Wholesale distributors often stock and sell thousands of inventory items. These items may be similar, with only slight variations in size, style, or other attributes for each family of products. But your customers don’t care about the other items, they work with you to get the items they need.
Today’s distribution firms have spent the year facing immense challenges just to keep the lights on. An unexpected revenue drop, staffing challenges, and international supply chain disruption have all come as a result of recent lockdowns, and the path to recovery might still look slower than one may hope. But recovery is coming, and it’s going to be important to keep your business focused on whatever is next.
The distribution landscape is in a constant state of change. Whether it’s the changes you’ve had to make to remain competitive in the past few years or the changes you’ve needed to make to survive 2020, your company has been consistently on the move as it worked to fend off challenges to business model, operating process, or margins.
In distribution, the product is a key part of your business. Though many distributors in recent years have looked toward partnership and value-added services as they look to fight off low-cost entrants, your business still relies on the same “product in, product out” model that it always has.
Vendor relationships matter now more than ever. After months of trying to stabilize cash flow and collect from customers in order to pay your own vendors, lockdowns are ending and things might finally be looking up. But you’re not out of the woods just yet. You’ve just spent months trying to work with your suppliers’ collections departments, and relations might still be a bit tense at the moment.